Many of us, whilst with many paths online to our identities, like to preserve some semblance of our online security. For me, one of my favorite pastimes is keeping my home address off of the ICANN records. I opted to use the Yahoo! Domains Private registration to keep me protected, but is private domain registration too private?

In my [admittedly] enraged state after speaking to an unsympathetic SSL provider’s customer service agent, it prompted me to write the following message to Yahoo! Small Business’ support department.

I bought an SSL certificate today, and while getting it implemented after generating and posting the CSR to the provider, they sent an email to the contact information on my whois record.

The domain in question is www.xxxxxxxxxx.com

Since I used your private registration, they’re sending confirmation to contact@myprivateregistration.com. Since www.myprivateregistration.com doesn’t go to a valid website and the phone number on the whois record goes to an overloaded/full voicemail box, I have ZERO reason to believe that the confirmation email (or any other email for that matter) will EVER make it to me as was promised when I registered for your private domain service.

I feel that you have the responsibility to do two things:

#1 - Get me a contact on my whois that is capable of at least FORWARDING email to me should anything come up that requires my attention. After all, that is the service that I PAID for.

#2 - Get me the confirmation email sent to contact@myprivateregistration.com or some other solution to my problem.

I am getting increasingly agitated with Yahoo! Small Business, as your website sucks and doesn’t work properly, your absurd domain costs (which I have opted to buy elsewhere from now on, but I don’t really have a choice for renewals which I know is precisely why you hike the rates so much), your 45-minute (thus far, as I am still on hold) phone service wait times, and now your apparent inability to effectively utilize private registration without obliterating all usefulness of WHOIS lookups and ICANN records.

Please address all problems I have mentioned promptly, as I both need my certificate up immediately and I need a really good excuse to leave the 13 domains I have registered with you on your service. Pricing/service elsewhere is looking VERY attractive.

Best Regards,

Adam Robertson

Now I’m not opposed to safety, but all Yahoo’s doing here is circumventing the system by posting whois info that doesn’t contact anyone. This isn’t only a disservice to me, but also people who are trying to contact me for legitimate reasons. Arg.

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

While I was writing this email AND this post, I was on hold the whole time waiting for a customer service representative. When my call got to 1 hour and 51 seconds (51 seconds being precisely the amount of time it took me to GET myself on hold), Yahoo up and killed the call. OBVIOUS: My frustration when at this point I was looking at my phone sitting on my desk with my jaw firmly locked in the open position. LESS OBVIOUS: My simultaneous efforts to subconsciously look for the nearest gun to shoot myself in the face.

Now apparently waiting on hold for AN ENTIRE HOUR was not enough to convince Yahoo that I thought my issue was important enough to require their attention, nor was it enough time for them to decide to employ more customer service representatives. I can’t imagine that they aren’t aware of their call volumes [though such a thing would make sense after they lost the majority of the search engine market to Google after being #1 since the inception of the internet], so what the f&%$ is going to have to happen for them to make some changes around there?